Since the last intervention at the library, I have been thinking about working with or for children. I’d like to start by talking about children’s portrait rights.
Throughout this year, I’ve been practising getting my point across without using images and keeping this blog as visual aid-free as possible. But in this case, I think watching this is a good substitute for what I’m worried about.
This is a very old problem. The term digital kidnapping was talked about a lot about five years ago, and we’ve been talking about protecting children’s portrait rights for 10 years, and it’s become a more sophisticated issue.
Now, what do we do about kids posting pictures of themselves?
A lot of the difficulty with this project was that there were no answers. It felt like a ruthless French bureaucrat kept shouting, “it depends”. Even the psychiatrist said, “It’s different for everybody, it’s different for every child, it’s different for every parent, it’s out of your hands, the doctors are all on different sides.
For me, there was no answer. I was not qualified to work with children. What I knew about children was based on a very small sample. I held art workshops to hear their voices, to hear what they wanted.
I could listen, and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and there were things I shouldn’t have heard. Why the little girl said she wanted to stab herself in the heart with a pencil, I can’t analyse. Did she watch a dramatic film before coming? Was she self-destructive? Did she want to make an impression? Did she want to know how I would respond?
I suggested it might be fun to metaphorically transform that. Could it not be something like the wind, rather than a pencil?
She accurately said that she literally wanted to stick a pencil into her heart.
“Oh, I should have brought crayons instead of pencils. Good thing I don’t have scissors.” These thoughts just flashed through my mind and I responded positively, praising and admiring everything about her—every single line she drew—to the best of my ability. If I did this to my boss, I’d probably already be promoted.
She shared something . The other parent who was there pretended not to hear, and the other girl consoled her by saying that it was mum’s thing.
I realised that I wasn’t good enough to be a supporter of children, and I was thinking a lot about whether I should just go back to making films that would have a good impact on children. To be of practical help, I need to be close to them. What is it about me that will make them trust and let me work with them?
Gallacher, L.A. and Gallagher, M., 2008. Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking throughparticipatory methods’. Childhood, 15(4), pp.499-516.